Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Introduction
There was everywhere amongst Orientalists the ambition to formulate their discoveries, experiences, and insights…
– Edward Said, Orientalism
Tag: Two Frenchmen in the Orient
Essay Series
Nearly fifty months in India and I am now acquainted and almost comfortable with my anxious passivity in front of the blank page. I can write on virtually everything, except for the very things I have been living. I could do with a reference. I could do with a template. I could do with a prototype of the traveler turned writer. Somewhere between Parkala and Manipal, I came across Flaubert.
Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 1
The genesis of a diary. I did not even look for being a foreigner. The travel as coincidence. No need to repeat that I was not feeling ‘good in my own skin’, as the French formula says…
Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 2
The most recurrent – and delightful – materials found in Flaubert’s stories from Egypt are precisely the author’s reflections on the very act of writing. Flaubert basically writes about writing. … But one would not deny that there is also a more humanistic interest in the project of travelling…